Hi everyone — I'm Andrey from the engineering team. I wanted to share a tool some of you might find handy: dbxcli, a command-line app for working with your Dropbox without opening the web UI.
We recently shipped updates with JSON output support, streaming uploads, and improved CI/automation readiness — so it felt like a good time to share it more broadly.
Heads up: this one's for the developers and power users out there — it runs in the terminal. If that's your thing, read on!
You can use it to upload, download, search, share, and restore files, sign in with OAuth, and work with team accounts. It also plays nicely with scripts, CI pipelines, and AI agents, since it can return structured (JSON) output and stable results.
Getting started
After installing, run dbxcli login to sign in via OAuth — it opens a browser window and stores a token locally. That's the only setup step. Run dbxcli --help to see all available commands.
A few examples
# Stream a project archive directly into Dropbox
tar cz ./project | dbxcli put - /Backups/project.tgz
# Create a shared link
dbxcli share-link create /Reports/report.pdf
# Download JSON to stdout and filter it without a temporary file
dbxcli get /Reports/results.json - | jq '.results[] | select(.status == "failed")'
# List files as structured output for a script or agent
dbxcli ls --output=json /
Install it
# Homebrew (macOS/Linux)
brew install dbxcli
# WinGet (Windows)
winget install --exact --id Dropbox.dbxcli
Source code, prebuilt binaries (macOS, Linux, Windows, OpenBSD), and the issue tracker are all on GitHub.
Give it a try and drop a reply here with what you automate — we're especially curious about CI/CD and AI agent use cases.
